A lot of the material wasn’t usable, because the game was cut away from before it was finished.

I’ve come to use a simple set of guidelines on which games to include, so I don’t have to rack my brain every time on whether it’s interesting enough. A tournament game not being finished is unfortunately a no go.

This has actually been a bit frustrating, with quite a few instances of good games being cut away from on ball three, just to show another game that’s already almost done, making both games unusable.

Of course, catering to a live audience is different from what I’m trying to accomplish here, but if any of you are involved in producing live tournament content, and don’t plan on doing any editing yourself, it would be cool to keep an eye on rewatchability in a more broken down format.

I realize that this might come off as a bit pretentious, since I’m, after all, just talking about some random little website, but I do think that a bunch of people could benefit from live footage being suitable to recycling it into a more bite-sized rewatch format, and that this way, the footage could draw a lot more interest beyond the original live stream.

I was really digging the game-focused commentary. That’s hard to keep up over a 10+ hour stream, and I think the commentators did a great job at keeping their attention on the matches, talking about rules and what’s going on, and not drifting off too much into unrelated stuff.

That’s what got me hooked on the early PAPA videos in the first place, but I feel that since live streaming has become the main PAPA format, the commentary got a bit less relevant to the actual matches.

Still great stuff, but at times there are some pretty long stretches where I’m not convinced the commentators are watching the game at all. With this broadcast, I didn’t really get that feeling.

As mentioned, I wasn’t too happy with how the tutorials were presented on my website, since all those different tutorial styles were just bunched together without any further indication of what to expect (except player names, which isn’t too helpful with multiple players doing tutorials for the same channel).

As a quick fix, I decided to add the YouTube channel names to all tutorial videos. I’m definitely not a UI guy, but I hope this makes the tutorials a bit more accessible. Any thoughts?

Here’s examples of different tutorial styles from different channels, in case you’re planning on doing tutorials yourself (do it!) and want to see how other people go about it:

(No quality selection – channels are ordered alphabetically, and the linked video is the alphabetically first tutorial in the channel. Disclaimer: the last link is a friend of mine, and he’s doing some quality stuff, so you should definitely have a watch.)

I would agree with you and have brought it up before. People streaming tournaments really need to pick a group or game and stick with it until it’s finished, regardless if the outcome has been decided. Cutting from one game to the next when they haven’t finished is a frustrating viewing experience.

I would suggest that it’s a frustrating experience for viewers to watch something that is already decided. The NFL will switch people from a poor game to an interesting game if it’s clear that one side is running away with it.

My opinion is that people streaming tournaments should do whatever the heck they want, because they are amazing.

It’s not like we’re getting all the data at the same time and editing it down into a watchable format; we’re watching in real time and have to make real-time decisions that are more interesting for the audience. In an ideal world, all the data from every camera is saved somewhere and you could go back and redit/dub commentary over all the matches and you could see everything. That, however, is obviously a lot of time and work. And the the real dream is keying in on the biggest moments/matches and getting that into an hour show. After coming back from a commerical, if you’re keying in on one match, then you show some highlights of major events in other matches that happened “while we were away”.

I understand wanting to get complete games for pinballvideos, but the reality is the live experience isn’t as interesting if you cater only to the long-term video archive.

We’re not quite there yet – we’ve passed curated after-the-fact content and are figuring out our way towards quality live content. What I was saying is just that this transition can be a bit frustrating at times.

@bkerins, by all means, people streaming tournaments should explore the medium in any way they feel is best – I’m pretty impressed by what has been done so far. I don’t quite agree with the NFL comparison: One person running away with a game of pinball just makes it more interesting to me. There’s that huge PvE component in pinball that can make a good game pretty suspenseful regardless of tournament context, and I’d argue that there’s a better chance of another player catching up than in most mainstream match sports.

This might warrant a separate discussion, though, since it’s more about what’s interesting or annoying to a live audience, than it is about pinballvideos.

I don’t think anything was directed at you, and want to thank you again for the work you’re putting into this archive. It’s outstanding.

I’m all for seeing how far a player can push the game. Depending on the game this can end up looking pretty grindy (Elwin’s 6 billion game on Dirty Harry comes to mind, also Jorian’s repeated thrashings of Star Trek). If there’s another game that is tense with finals implications, it feels right to switch in those moments.

Ideally we could play each round separately and cover them all, this is what playoffs in major sports look like. Time-wise that’s not going to happen just yet

Hi! Just chiming in to say that I love this site, and I use it all the time. Thanks so much for all the time you put into it.

@umbilico To your earlier comment about the commentary in PAPA events — I totally agree. As someone who is still learning how to play well competitively, the commentary is easily as valuable as the game footage, and totally what got me into watching the streams in the first place.

Just as there are players I love to watch, there are commentators I love to listen to. Any thoughts on including commentator metadata along with the player listings?

I’m all for seeing how far a player can push the game. Depending on the game this can end up looking pretty grindy (Elwin’s 6 billion game on Dirty Harry comes to mind, also Jorian’s repeated thrashings of Star Trek). If there’s another game that is tense with finals implications, it feels right to switch in those moments.

I’ve actually gone back and watched both of these events multiple times(DH and ST pwnage), and haven’t gone back to watch something like PAPA finals this year on a drainy CV, even though the stakes were much higher in that game and outcome less certain.

I’ve also gone back to watch the Jackbot NWPC craziness with Cayle/Daniele multiple times.

I’ll probably go back and watch the recent Funhouse slaying that was done, as well.

Hey, I love the website, it’s a great resource. A lot of pinball videos are scattered around so it’s nice to have a single place to find most of them. I just wanted to echo the suggestion of a submissions link, as I’ve noticed a couple videos that aren’t included on the site. Thanks again for the hard work!

Thanks for all the feedback, and I’m sorry that it took me that long to get back to you – things just tend to move slower in the summer.

@juanlargo: I feel you, I do have some favorite commentators of my own, and if this were somebody else’s project, I’d be totally with you pushing those guys to add this stuff. As it is, with just me doing this, and commentator names for each match not being readily available (not to mention me not being an actual UI guy who could just put that stuff in without making things too cramped), I’m sorry to say that this won’t happen any time soon.

@johnnyfive: It’s the same for me, I keep coming back to the big games. I don’t know much about the technicalities involved, but it would be pretty cool if all those cameras would just independently record what’s going on, so the stream has total freedom to switch around to the most interesting stuff, while the full games can still be put on youtube. This would be pretty much what @keefer mentioned, and it’s probably a lot of work with editing and recording after the fact commentary, so I assume this won’t happen.

@jdh: I’ve been going on the assumption that most of the people interested in this kind of thing would be hanging out on pinside or here anyway, so I didn’t really think of adding a submission link. I might be wrong, though, so I’ll keep this in mind the next time I get a chance to do some work on the site. In the meantime, please feel free to suggest any videos either here or via the contact information in the footer of the site.

Possibly my most visited site at the moment. Love it. Thank you for all the effort it must have taken to categorize these.

One small suggestion - when you’re watching a video, you have the text (eg) ‘You are watching: Jackbot, Pinburgh 2014’. Would be nice if the game name/tournament were clickable so that you could quickly return back to the list you came from.

Also thanks for the suggestion – machine, player, and tournament names on the video page are now linked to their respective lists.

One quick question, though: If this is just about going back to the list you’ve been coming from, using either the browser’s back button or the tab navigation should work just as well. Did you experience any problems there? If so, please let me know which browser you are using – I’d like to fix that.

This might be a good time to reiterate that I’m not making any money off pinballvideos.com – if you want to link to it from some other application, you’d make me happy, and it might benefit the community, but I’m not laughing my way to the bank.